Red Dead Redemption Biggest Pet Peeves

Ah, Red Dead Redemption, you are so fantastic. All the hype this game has gotten and continues to receive is well-deserved. GTAIV is a great game in its’ own right, but RDR blows the replay value out of the water. I pre-ordered Red Dead Redemption from Gamestop for the special edition Outfit. Unfortunately for me, I had work to do, so I didn’t go to the release party and had to wait until Friday to sink my teeth into it.

There are countless blogs talking this game up, and as you can see in the previous paragraph this writer feels no different. The art, music, scene editing, storyline… absolutely breathtaking.

What I’d like to do is list my biggest pet peeves about RDR, not an original idea I’m sure, but I haven’t read any yet.

Your horse loves to go swimming!

OK, this can be funny, but seriously now. What happened, did we teach horses and cows to swim in the mid-1900s? I’ve whistled for my horse and watched him run straight into the water like he was a dolphin in a previous life or some shit. And he knows it will kill him, that bastard damn well knows. During a cutscene he walked right past me and an NPC to see what the end of a dock looks like. Me and a friend watched him take a 15-second cruise straight for the river with me chasing behind him whistling the entire time. He would not stop. We laughed for a good 10 minutes over it.

Now, the storyline is that the reason John Marsten can’t swim is he doesn’t know how… fair enough, Rockstar. But after the game is beaten, and water is not needed as a border any more, let’s get some Swimming Lessons event, ok? OK.

To Load, or not to Load, that is the question.

Being stuck at a Loading screen is never fun, this has happened maybe 10 times. Mostly, it involves switching between Multiplayer and Single Player modes from what I can tell, but it has happened in just Multiplayer. I foresee a patch fixing this in the near future.

Who on earth is talking to me?

To clarify, this is on the 360, so PS3 owners… ignore. Set up a Party Chat. Party Chat is buggy anyway I know, at least it is for me and my friends. Once you’re in Party Chat you can do a Free Roam, and you all can talk to each other. We were having dropped connections, people being removed from their Free Roam session, etc. I’d like to know if others experience the same.

So eventually, we switched to just using in-game chat. I couldn’t find a setting to only have your Posse be able to talk with each other, and I know for a fact every now and then random people, not in the posse, would be talking to us. It makes it very annoying to talk about a strategy when you’re after someone if they can hear you.

This may be easy to learn why, but this is a pet peeve article, I don’t have to be smart about it.

Achievement Whoring

That title is misleading, I see nothing wrong with achievement whoring. I just hate that, once again, there are no counters. How many bears have I killed? Have I done X event or Y event? Lots of games do this, and it may not be Rockstar’s fault at all, I’m not placing blame.